Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Liah Greenfeld Confirmed as Plenary Speakers for the 2020 IPSA World Congress

IPSA is proud to announce that Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, and Professor Liah Greenfeld, University Professor and Professor of Sociology, Political Science, and Anthropology at Boston University, will serve as plenary speakers at the 26th IPSA World Congress of Political Science in Lisbon.

In their plenary speeches, both speakers will focus on nationalism

Professor Spivak will deliver a plenary address titled Why Nationalisms in South and North Today?

“Although in an economically restructured world, capital is almost fully global, economic growth is still measured state by state. It is ideologically necessary to keep this competitive spirit, required for globality to function in a capitalist way, to thicken the abstractions of the state with the fuzziness of the nation. These new nationalisms, based on phantasmatic identity politics, go against the performative contradictions (between liberty for me and equality for others) of democracy as mindset rather than vote count alone. Historically, then, how to think the Marshall Plan and today’s One Belt One Road together? The new subaltern -- unlike in Gramsci’s day -- is precisely used for democracy as body count in the largest sectors of the electorate. In terms of this, how do we compute the relationship between subalternity and citizenship? Undergirding all, we must ask how to think gender within this confusing picture of our world. These questions can cover over the fact that economic growth does not promise social inclusion; and that identity is tremendously heterogeneous even within the “same” language, the “same” religion -- and this too is ideologically managed.”

Professor Greenfeld will give a plenary speech titled Globalization of Nationalism.

“This plenary lecture will address the nature of nationalism: national consciousness, national identity, and the organization of communities as nations – that is, as sovereign communities of fundamentally equal members, however the membership is defined. Connecting nationalism to modern democracy, liberal and authoritarian, and examining its relationship to political ideologies of the last two and a half centuries, left and right, socialism, communism, classical liberalism, populism, fascism, and feminism, among others, it will attempt to demonstrate that nationalism lies behind modern politics, in general, essentially defining modern political culture.

It will, next, analyze the reasons for the continued appeal of nationalism in the context of an increasingly open world, attributing this appeal to the dignity with which nationalism endows personal identities of common people. Globalization, it will argue, though usually seen as the opposite of nationalism, is, in fact, a product of nationalism and, to the extent that world is becoming unified, it is becoming unified in the shared – national – consciousness, paradoxically drawing countries into ever more intense competition for international dignity, or prestige.”